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June 2023 Issue
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Ukrainian soldiers train in an abandoned building in western Ukraine before
being sent to battle, March 2023.
Global


THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE

The future of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian
military can break a stalemate with Russia and drive the country
backwards—perhaps even out of Crimea for good.

By Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg
Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin
May 1, 2023
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In March 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover
of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her
empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and
the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded
cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783,
he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in
particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now
impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes
does not exist.


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The rest of the world remembers Potemkin differently, for something that we
would now call a disinformation campaign. In 1787, Catherine paid a six-month
visit to Crimea and the land then known as New Russia. The story goes that
Potemkin built fake villages along her route, populated with fake villagers
exuding fake prosperity. These villages probably never existed, but the story
has endured for a reason: The sycophantic courtier, creating false images for
the empress, is a figure we know from other times and other places. The tale
also evokes something we recognize to be true, not just of imperial Russia but
of Putin’s Russia, where mind-boggling efforts are made to please the
leader—efforts that these days include telling him he is winning a war that he
is most definitely not winning.



In a bid to restore Potemkin’s cities to Russian suzerainty, Russia occupied
Kherson in early March of 2022, at the outset of a campaign to annihilate both
Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine. Russian soldiers kidnapped the mayor, tortured
city employees, murdered civilians, and stole children. In September, Putin held
a ceremony in the Kremlin declaring Kherson and other occupied territories to be
part of Russia. But Kherson did not become Russia. Partisans fought back inside
the city, with car bombs and sabotage. Even as the occupiers held a ludicrous
referendum, designed to show that Ukrainians had chosen Russia, the Russian army
was quietly preparing to flee. By October, this new Potemkin village was
collapsing, and the resurgent Ukrainian army was approaching the outskirts of
Kherson. It was then that the Russians did something particularly strange: They
kidnapped the bones of Grigory Potemkin.

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